It's all in a word cloud

Letters Editor Betty Talbert writes:Wordles word clouds are a fun way to analyze the latest political speech by frequency of word use. Above is the Wordle analysis of President Obama's April 13 deficit speech.

The Guardian's website in the UK did an analysis of President Barack Obama's State of the Union speech using www.wordles.net, which is a site that creates word clouds that “give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.” Here is the Guardian's evaluation of the most commonly used words in the president's State of the Union speech back in January.

Words, of course, signal themes, and are used to hammer away on positive or negative topics in order to make their points. Conversely, the less a word is used, generally, the less emphasis that topic is given in the totality of the speech. Of course, context and sentence structure is everything and each sentence's meaning tells its own tale.

The above analysis is just for fun, of course, and is not scientific. The favorite words (or themes) Obama (or his speech writers') used to argue for his plan to dig us out of the $14 trillion U.S. deficit are: deficit, America, country, believe, vision, spending, tax, pay, reduce, trillion. As always remember to look at the small print: invest, billion, work, class, tough, cut back, take, create.

So what do you think when you see this word cloud? What words pop out to you? Do you see any of these words used by Obama in order to reinforce his “vision?” Use the comments section below to tell us what you see in this word cloud.

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